LOS ANGELES — Kayla Elliott thought she was helping a family who couldn’t conceive by birthing a surrogate child for a couple in Southern California.
Instead, she said, she was caught in a web of deceit that led police to uncover 21 children, who were born to different surrogate mothers, living in the home of Silvia Zhang and Guojun Xuan in Arcadia, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles.
Zhang and Xuan were arrested in May on suspicion of felony child endangerment and neglect after a local hospital called police to report that a 2-month-old baby had arrived with head injuries, Arcadia police said in a statement.
A nanny who worked with the couple is suspected of violently shaking the child, causing the baby to lose consciousness. According to police, the parents were aware of the abuse but failed to seek timely medical help.
A warrant has been issued for the nanny, whom police haven’t been able to locate, police said.
Elliott said Wednesday that she was dumbstruck when she learned the child she bore was among them.
“I was a bit hysterical,” she said. “You just don’t expect that you’re going to go through a pregnancy and a delivery and then hand the baby over to their parents and then all of a sudden find out that there was abuse and neglect going on.”
The surrogacy agency, Mark Surrogacy Investment LLC, told her that the couple had one teenage child and that they had given up on trying to have a second after 10 rounds of failed fertility treatments, Elliott said.
She later learned that Mark Surrogacy was registered at the couple’s Arcadia address.
During their child endangerment investigation, police discovered 15 children at the couple’s house. Six more children belonging to the couple were found in the care of family members and friends. The youngest was the 2-month-old, and the eldest was 13, police said.
“We believe one or two were born biologically to the mother,” Police Lt. Kollin Cieadlo said. “There are some surrogates who have come forward and said they were surrogates for the children.”
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Zhang and Xuan had a lawyer who could speak on their behalf.
While public records show the business license for Mark Surrogacy was recently terminated, a pregnant surrogate told NBC News the agency continues to contact her.
On Wednesday, KTLA-TV of Los Angeles reported that it received a text message from a phone associated with Zhang that read: “Any accusations of wrongdoing are misguided and wrong. We look forward to vindicating any such claims at the appropriate time when and if any actions are brought.”
After the baby Elliott carried for Zhang and Xuan was born, she learned it was living not in Cuba with the couple but with a nanny and another child of similar age, she said.
Kallie Fell, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Bioethics & Culture Network, said Elliott’s experience isn’t entirely uncommon. She said she has spoken with hundreds of surrogates worldwide who shared nightmare scenarios, including a woman whose surrogate family refused to provide healthy living conditions while she was pregnant.
“There’s so many ways these kinds of things can go sideways, and no amount of law will protect a woman or child, because surrogate pregnancies are high-risk by nature,” she said.
In Elliott’s case, something seemed off as soon as the baby was born, she said. Zhang was hours late for the birth and barely looked at the baby in the hospital room, Elliott said. Before she left, Zhang handed Elliot $2,000 in cash.
“I don’t know what the motive was now, but it was just very, very not what you would expect out of somebody who really wanted a child,” Elliott said. “It was very transactional.”
The child Kayla birthed is now in foster care, and she said she is working on gaining custody of the baby.
The 20 other children are in the custody of a California child-welfare agency while Arcadia police and the FBI investigate the couple and determine whether they misled surrogate mothers around the country, officials said.
Bail for Zhang and Xuan was set at $500,000 each. They were released, Cieadlo said.
Emilie Ikeda and Alicia Victoria Lozano reported from Los Angeles and Minyvonne Burke from Pittsburgh.